First is family sharing, this feature is near and dear to me and I truly felt it would have helped the industry grow and make both gamers and developers happy. The premise is simple and elegant, when you buy your games for Xbox One, you can set any of them to be part of your shared library. Anyone who you deem to be family had access to these games regardless of where they are in the world. There was never any catch to that, they didn’t have to share the same billing address or physical address it could be anyone. When your family member accesses any of your games, they’re placed into a special demo mode. This demo mode in most cases would be the full game with a 15-45 minute timer and in some cases an hour. This allowed the person to play the game, get familiar with it then make a purchase if they wanted to. When the time limit was up they would automatically be prompted to the Marketplace so that they may order it if liked the game. We were toying around with a limit on the number of times members could access the shared game (as to discourage gamers from simply beating the game by doing multiple playthroughs). but we had not settled on an appropriate way of handling it. One thing we knew is that we wanted the experience to be seamless for both the person sharing and the family member benefiting. There weren’t many models of this system already in the wild other than Sony’s horrendous game sharing implementation, but it was clear their approach (if one could call it that) was not the way to go. Developers complained about the lost sales and gamers complained about overbearing DRM that punished those who didn’t share that implemented by publishers to quell gamers from taking advantage of a poorly thought out system. We wanted our family sharing plan to be something that was talked about and genuinely enjoyed by the masses as a way of inciting gamers to try new games.

Did anyone actually expect to be allowed to share their entire library with 10 people? More fool them.

Yup, it seems "half of Neowin" thought they'd be exploiting cheap games galore... from MS.... really. "The used game market is killing the industry!"... "Lets allow one copy of a game to be bought at steam prices, then shared to 10 people".

So we're going to trust posts by people who now know they can't be proven wrong? New low.

Nobody but MS knew the truth, let's remember that before jumping on the bandwagon.

Versus all you guys saying it was a revolutionary feature and your little granny in Australia was going to get to play all your games? Think about what is realistic in this gaming industry, and while we can't 100% fact check against something that is no more, the OP has a pretty detailed link of Xbox One stuff.

it is good news to know that it's still on the table. I had said I will buy digital so as to get the disc-less gameplay so I can call up any game at any time without having to go look for a disc or wonder if someone had borrowed it.

about the family share I'm glad to know it's still on the table for digital titles

I'm sad to know that they removed the option to trade/resell digital titles (but oh well, win some lose some)

it was said that 2 people playing the same game played the full game (eg. co-op). with the other games offered to the 10 family who had access I'm sure it wouldn't have been the full game.

You know what the 1 redeeming feature of "Family Sharing", would be? Provided the game is in your social circle, every game sold would have a demo available to try. In turn that means devs don't need to take time away from developing to create a special cut down version. They're often complaining about having to spend time meeting deadlines for builds to all the trade shows etc. This would have taken away some of the pressure. Although I'm sure Activision would have done their best to block it, seeing as they don't send out review copies as it is, never mind demos.

Of course like I say, it would be limited to what's available in your group of 10 but whatever.

Still would have been a good feature, but I think this makes MUCH more sense than everyone's claim that you'd just be able to share a game that easily. I mean, if the publishers are truly behind the reasoning for a 24-hour check in, why would it make any sense that the publishers would be totally fine with sharing games in this manner? Think about it: if they don't want you to continue sharing your game for a week, why would they deem it okay to so easily share a game with one person indefinitely? That would ruin sales, would it not?

That's the part that never added up to me. Everyone just kept crying about all of this though, claiming those critiquing the 24 hour check in were responsible for ruining their DRM party, but I don't see any party. Lots of this just didn't add up to begin with...

I think we need to take a moment and remember that Microsoft, just like any other company for that matter, is not your friend. If you see a good product, by all means buy it; however, let's quit pretending that each and every company is out for our best interests and remember what it is we want as gamers.

I love the "It doesn't exist now so everyone who thinks it will exist is delusional and it can't possibly be true or happen" line of thinking going on. If we all went by that, we'd be back in the dark ages. There are plenty of ways full sharing could be implemented and work just fine for the market if not bolster it, but I feel like my time would be better spent talking to a wall than explaining things here.